Here's Where FBI Officials Realized What Could Be the DOJ's Goal in Raiding Mar-a-Lago

What would the government do about the classified materials still stored at Mar-a-Lago? It’s a meeting that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice didn’t want to have, but they were mulling options over how to obtain the rest of the files. NBC News penned a lengthy article about this heated meeting, where the FBI was concerned about the optics of raiding a former president’s home while top DOJ officials couldn’t care less. The bureau was also concerned about the political donations made by Jay Bratt, a top DOJ prosecutor, who supposedly was apolitical to his core, a consummate professional who harbored no anti-Trump bias: He just donated to the political rival party. Bratt wasn’t giving money like the late Sheldon Adelson, but it’s the principle of the matter—the officials in this room, at this rank, shouldn’t be making such contributions. 

Steven D’Antuono, now retired, was then chief of the Washington bureau office for the FBI, and he wanted a conciliatory and less-than-hostile approach to repossessing the files at Mar-a-Lago. The funny part about this meeting was that the main narrative used by the DOJ to storm Trump’s Florida residence was over national security concerns. The house was guarded by the Secret Service. The files were in a secure location. 

In D’Antuono’s mind, there was no need to execute a storm-the-Bastille-like operation. Everyone at this meeting knew their careers were on the line, along with the severe political ramifications if things went sideways. It’s also where the FBI stumbled upon the DOJ’s main aim against the former president regarding the files, the raid, and how to catalog the legal documentation for a judge to sign off on the search. Trump would need to be accused of committing a crime, one that could bar him from political office [emphasis mine]: 

On Aug. 1, 2022, senior Justice Department and FBI officials gathered on the seventh floor of the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., for a historic meeting. 

They exchanged pleasantries, shook hands, and took seats in Room 7427, the FBI general counsel’s conference room, a nondescript gathering place with a long rectangular table surrounded by no-frills office chairs. Each official wore a suit, mandatory attire on the storied floor that houses the office of the FBI director and his top advisers. 

The senior DOJ officials had left their headquarters, an elegant mix of Classical and Art Deco architecture, and met their bureau colleagues across Pennsylvania Avenue in the FBI headquarters, a Brutalist structure considered one of the ugliest buildings in Washington. Their goal was to have what one participant later called a “come to Jesus” meeting. 

[…] 

The DOJ and FBI officials shared the same feeling about the case: dread. After the National Archives repeatedly requested that Trump return the documents, some officials assumed Trump would simply hand over the materials. When he didn’t, all of them saw no good options. 

“You know what the reaction was in the department?” recalled a former FBI official involved in the case who asked not to be named. “We were like, ‘Oh shit, we don’t want any part of this. The real enemies are Russia and China.’” 

[…] 

D’Antuono, though, was concerned about the approach of the DOJ team investigating Trump, which [Jay] Bratt led. “Jay was being a little overly aggressive,” D’Antuono recalled. “The aggressiveness that was there, from day one.” 

D’Antuono said that Bratt’s behavior may have been fueled by the extraordinarily high-profile nature of the case. “This is a huge case. It’s the former president,” D’Antuono said. “Was some of it due to ambition? Jay has been an attorney for a long time. This is the case of the century.” 

In a less divisive era in American politics, personal political donations might have drawn less attention. It was generally accepted that career DOJ and FBI officials could put their personal politics aside and investigate any elected official, Republican or Democrat, in a fair and fact-based manner. 

[…] 

As the meeting dragged on, the discussion grew increasingly heated. Bratt raised his voice several times. When D’Antuono asked if prosecutors now considered Trump the subject of the investigation, Bratt shot back, “What does that matter?” but didn’t answer the question. 

FBI officials from the Washington field office were in open conflict with Bratt and other DOJ prosecutors. 

D’Antuono, convinced that a consensual search could end the standoff, stood his ground. He believed that they could negotiate with Trump’s lawyer, Evan Corcoran, a former federal prosecutor, and reach an agreement for a voluntary search. 

DOJ officials and senior FBI officials rejected the idea. They said that Trump and Corcoran had already received a subpoena and been repeatedly asked to return the documents.

D’Antuono dug in and said he would only have his agents search Mar-a-Lago if ordered to do so by his FBI superiors. 

[…] 

After the DOJ officials left, the FBI officials spoke alone. D’Antuono and others from the Washington field office expressed a new concern. They noted that the draft search warrant included a potential criminal charge against Trump that they did not recall seeing before: Section 2071 of Title 18. 

The law made it illegal for an individual who possesses government documents to “willfully and unlawfully” conceal, remove, mutilate, obliterate, falsify, or destroy them. If a person is convicted of the charge, they shall “be disqualified from holding” any federal office.

“The barring from office charge,” D’Antuono recalled. “People saw that charge as ‘Aha, is that DOJ’s effort to get Trump?’” 

Other FBI officials did not consider Bratt to be politically biased. Instead, they feared that Trump’s years of attacks were now impacting the decision-making of current FBI agents.

The irony of this piece is the lengthy passages about bias, conspiracy theories, and hyper-partisanship that these institutions were not meant to soak up in executing their function as law enforcement and investigative bodies. And yet, there’s no bias within the halls of the DOJ, and everyone is level-headed when we know that’s a lie. DOJ officials doctored or outright withheld exculpatory evidence when securing illegal FISA spy warrants against Trump campaign officials like Carter Page. The FBI spied on Trump’s campaign—literally—via Crossfire Hurricane. The FBI/DOJ is not meant to navigate partisan political waters; they’re stirring the pot. The aversion to calling out the hacks in these departments is also painful to read. 

The attorney general is trying to sell the line that the DOJ/FBI is home to ‘the most patriotic, apolitical officials in government’ who also donate to Democrats, secure illegal spy warrants on the Democrats’ political rivals, and want to storm into Trump’s home to reclaim documents you’d think would be of such a national security interest that it could make for film material for a feature similar to Sneakers. 

There’s another theory: The DOJ felt that the comprehensive binder on the Russian collusion investigation, all the dirty laundry about this probe that House investigators compiled in 2019-2020 was at Mar-a-Lago. This binder reportedly went missing before the COVID pandemic, and the usual Deep State subjects were fearful that Trump had a copy of the original file on the property.

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